论文标题

自适应随机森林,用于对微控制器的节能推断

Adaptive Random Forests for Energy-Efficient Inference on Microcontrollers

论文作者

Daghero, Francesco, Burrello, Alessio, Xie, Chen, Benini, Luca, Calimera, Andrea, Macii, Enrico, Poncino, Massimo, Pagliari, Daniele Jahier

论文摘要

由于其硬件友好的操作以及对实际相关任务的高精度,随机森林(RFS)是低功率嵌入式设备中广泛使用的机器学习模型。 RF的准确性通常会随内部弱学习者(决策树)的数量而增加,但以成比例增加的推理潜伏期和能耗为代价。考虑到,在大多数应用中,输入并非所有同样难以分类。因此,通常仅对于(少数)硬输入而需要大的RF,而对于更容易的射频输入而言。在这项工作中,我们为RF提出了一种早期的机制,该机制在达到高增量分类置信度后立即终止了推断,从而减少了用于轻松输入的弱学习者的数量。可以在运行时控制早期的置信度阈值,以倾向于节能或准确性。我们将方法应用于单核RISC-V微控制器上的三个不同的嵌入式分类任务,从而将能量从38%降低到90%以上,而准确性降低了0.5%。我们还表明,我们的方法的表现优于先前的RF自适应ML方法。

Random Forests (RFs) are widely used Machine Learning models in low-power embedded devices, due to their hardware friendly operation and high accuracy on practically relevant tasks. The accuracy of a RF often increases with the number of internal weak learners (decision trees), but at the cost of a proportional increase in inference latency and energy consumption. Such costs can be mitigated considering that, in most applications, inputs are not all equally difficult to classify. Therefore, a large RF is often necessary only for (few) hard inputs, and wasteful for easier ones. In this work, we propose an early-stopping mechanism for RFs, which terminates the inference as soon as a high-enough classification confidence is reached, reducing the number of weak learners executed for easy inputs. The early-stopping confidence threshold can be controlled at runtime, in order to favor either energy saving or accuracy. We apply our method to three different embedded classification tasks, on a single-core RISC-V microcontroller, achieving an energy reduction from 38% to more than 90% with a drop of less than 0.5% in accuracy. We also show that our approach outperforms previous adaptive ML methods for RFs.

扫码加入交流群

加入微信交流群

微信交流群二维码

扫码加入学术交流群,获取更多资源